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My Day at the Beach

 A recent trip to my fave North Carolina beach reminded me of all the things I love about small town beach life, the South, and the not-yet-crowded May beach scene.  Southern beaches have a very different etiquette of space, friendliness and neighborliness that I have always loved. And it's also how you can always spot Northerners who haven't yet learned "our ways".


First off, I love reading at the beach.  Not on a device, from an actual book.  And it's typically a battered old comfort book that I've read several times.  In this case, I re-read Patti and Robert's time in New York in the Summer of Love of 1967 and their trips to Coney Island.  May I never grow tired of two of my iconic young bohemians.


Second, I love to lazily walk along the beach.  No destination, no step counting, no agenda.  Just an easy-going walk.  While I'm walking, I people watch, admire frolicking dogs and children and generally lazily smile at anything going on around me.  I love the friendliness of the beach.....how everyone will kindly wave and gesture at strangers.  Several of us all stopped to watch a beautiful Golden Retriever rolling around in the sand.  I think we all walked away feeling like nothing better could happen all day. 

I also had to stop and appreciate the fact that I could, in fact, WALK on the beach after a winter season of difficulty due to a herniated L4.  To walk by the dunes and down to the water was a gift.   

I love watching families interacting on the beach.  I watched a family all help to bury a teenage boy in the sand, and his father who kept coming back to throw on just a little more to the pile.  I enjoyed watching a very strongly-built and very probably either law enforcement or veteran dad as he watched his wife and four daughters play in the surf.  He was keeping watch like a sentry, and I realized these 5 women would be his queens for life.  

I always enjoy the circles that women make with their chairs on the beach.  Their laughter, the leaning-in, the realization of how and who is related.  It's generational sisterhood right in front of me, and sheesh am I a fan of that!



Tertiarily, I love to sun.  And while I'm sunning I love to listen to the interesting conversations that float to me by way of the ocean acoustics.  I listened to a dad give his daughter advice about how to handle being multiracial and heard a 40-something lady lament that she had missed her chance at having tattoos.

A foursome of adults just a touch older than me were having a lively discussion about the Kentucky Derby going on that very day.  (This same group was also trying to fly a kite that nearly killed me, but it was a great introduction into their group.  I'm not mad at it!)

I love listening to the sea birds overhead, the children laughing and playing, the dogs barking and the adults exclaiming some kind of silly joy.  Isn't the beach the place that brings us all back to the simple things we love?  Innocence.  Escape.  Memories of childhood.  


Never having been one to mind sitting in solitude on the beach alone, I have always come up with so many ideas......writing topics, answers to life's big problems, reasons for why things went right or wrong, goals and promises for the future.  This particular day was no exception.  I left feeling light, free and ready for the summer and what it might hold for me.  Hope to see you there too!

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Location: Oak Island, NC, USA

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